What We Found Measuring Every Dentist in Edmonton

The Measurement

We tracked 483 distinct dentist-related keywords across Edmonton, pulled organic and map-pack results for each on both desktop and mobile, and separately ran a 90-point Share of Local Voice geo-grid: a 10-by-9 lattice of fixed points across the metro, spaced roughly 1.8 kilometres apart, each one a real mobile local-finder search for “dentist” run from that exact location. Across the two methods, 296 distinct businesses showed up somewhere in the results. This is the same measurement we open every client engagement with, applied here across an entire category instead of one business.

The Market Is a Head-Term Story

The 483 tracked keywords carry a combined 56,570 searches a month, and the top 10 keywords by volume alone hold 77.8% of it. For any Edmonton business, this is the first useful fact a measurement like this delivers: demand in a local category is rarely spread evenly across hundreds of long-tail phrases. It concentrates hard on a small set of head terms, and a business that has not confirmed where its own category's volume actually sits is very likely optimizing for the wrong list.

The Map Pack Is Almost Everywhere, and Almost Nobody Wins Both Layers

The local pack rendered on 93% of the 483 tracked queries, meaning nearly every dentist search in Edmonton surfaces a map pack above the organic results. But of the 1,407 website-matchable pack placements across the whole pull, only 405, 28.8%, also reached the organic top 10 for that same query. Winning the map pack and winning organic are, for most businesses in this market, separate contests decided by separate signals. A business planning its Edmonton SEO around organic content alone is ignoring the layer that shows up on 93% of the searches that matter.

The Grid Finds Winners a Citywide Pull Never Would

A conventional, single-location competitor pull for this market surfaced 195 businesses and ranked Bridgeview Dental Clinic second citywide, with 125 pack appearances. Our 90-point grid told a different story: Bridgeview was confirmed absent from all 90 grid cells. It never once appeared in the map pack from any of the 90 fixed points we searched from across the actual city. A ranking that looks like a strong second place from one search location can be, from everywhere a real customer might actually be standing, functionally invisible. Ten other businesses that placed in our grid's own top 25 by Share of Local Voice, including clinics in Southgate, Millwoods, and Skyview, never appeared at all in the citywide pull. The two methods are not two views of the same answer; they are two different answers, and only one of them reflects what an actual customer standing somewhere in Edmonton would see.

The Albany Paradox: Winning Organic, Invisible on the Map

The clearest illustration in the entire dataset is a single business. Albany Dental holds the highest on-page authority score we measured in the market, 81 out of 100, and 14 organic number-one rankings worth a combined $40,750 a month in tracked search volume, the strongest organic footprint of any dentist in Edmonton. And Albany recorded zero appearances in the citywide, keyword-based map-pack pull across all 483 queries. Zero. The reason is geographic: Albany's clinic sits roughly 10 kilometres from the market's commercial centroid, four to eight times farther out than the businesses actually leading the pack. Content and link authority bought Albany the organic layer outright and could not buy back a single map-pack appearance, because proximity is a ranking input that no amount of on-page work overrides.

The opposite pattern shows up just as clearly. A domain called edmontonemergencydentists.com holds 70 separate organic number-one rankings, five times more than Albany, and those 70 rankings carry only about $90 a month in combined tracked search volume. Raw ranking-position counts, taken without the volume behind them, actively mislead: 70 number-ones sounds dominant and is nearly worthless, while Albany's 14 carry over 450 times the monthly value.

Device Divergence: Desktop and Mobile Disagree More Than You’d Expect

Of the 483 tracked keywords, 100, roughly 21%, showed a different organic number-one result on desktop than on mobile, and that divergent set carried a combined 16,960 in monthly search volume, large enough that ignoring it means optimizing for the wrong device without realizing it. Albany Dental's organic number-one count nearly doubled moving from desktop to mobile, from five to nine, which we attribute to a render-parity build: byte-identical desktop and mobile HTML at 157 kilobytes with 69 lazy-loaded images, meaning Google's mobile crawler sees essentially the same content a desktop crawler does. Strathcona Dental showed the mirror pattern, winning six desktop-only number-one positions in that same divergent set, the most of any domain measured. For any Edmonton business investing in a website rebuild, this is a directly actionable finding: how a site renders on mobile relative to desktop is not a cosmetic detail, it measurably shifted which domain won a fifth of the market's divergent keyword set.

Where the Two Layers Overlap Least

Looking at full search-result pages rather than individual business placements sharpens the point further. Of 791 query-device combinations in the pull that showed a visible map pack, only 263 of those, 33.2%, had any pack business also present in the organic top 10 for that same page. Put plainly, two out of three times an Edmonton dentist search shows a map pack, none of the businesses in it also hold an organic top-10 spot for the identical search. The two contests are not just separately scored; for most of this market's real search traffic, they are won by entirely different sets of businesses.

What This Means for Your Edmonton Business

None of this is really about dentistry. The same structure, a head-term-heavy demand curve, a map pack that renders constantly and rewards proximity over content, and a citywide pull that misses genuine local winners, shows up in essentially every competitive Edmonton category we have measured this way. If your business competes in a market with this shape, three questions from this study are worth asking about your own visibility before you spend anything on SEO:

Are you measuring from where your customers actually are, or from one office address that happens to be convenient to search from? A single search tells you almost nothing about a citywide market.

Do you know whether your gap is in the map pack, in organic, or in both, given that they are scored by different systems and, in this market, only 28.8% of businesses that win one also win the other?

Are you chasing ranking-count vanity metrics instead of the tracked search volume actually sitting behind those rankings, the way a 70-number-one, $90-a-month domain would tempt you to?

This is the measurement we run before we touch your site, your Google Business Profile, or a single piece of content: a full-market keyword pull and a 90+-point geo-grid, specific to your category and your part of the city, so that whatever we recommend afterward is built on where you actually stand rather than where a single search made it look like you stand.

Read how we run this measurement in full, or see it applied to the whole Edmonton SEO practice on our main Edmonton SEO page.

More Categories, Same Method

This study is the first of several we are building for the Edmonton market, applying the same 90-point grid and full-market SERP pull to categories beyond dentistry, including towing and carpet installation. Each will be published on our case studies page as the measurement is completed, with the same standard applied every time: every figure in the study has to trace back to a specific grid cell, a specific tracked keyword, or a specific SERP-feature count from the raw pull, not a summary written after the fact. If a number in a study cannot be traced that way, it does not belong in the study.